TFS Checkin Notes and Policies Support

IntelliJ IDEA Team Foundation Server integration now supports checkin notes and policies. Checkin notes are the arbitrary text fields that you can associate with a checkin. You can mark them as mandatory, so that everyone will be required to type something before performing a checkin. This is handy, for example, when you need developers to provide a comment from manager who reviewed their code.

Checkin policies are the rules executed before every checkin to ensure that a selected changeset is OK to commit. For example, a policy may verify that a valid comment is specified for a changeset, or that required work items are associated with it, or that file names that it includes match corporate naming standatds, etc.

IntelliJ IDEA allows you to implement custom policies in the form of plugins and configure them on a server.

This functionality is available in both IntelliJ IDEA 8 and Maia. For more information refer to this Confluence page.